After leaks surfaced yesterday, Sony has officially announced its Xperia Pro-I, a smartphone with a wild camera—or a wild camera that’s also a smartphone, depending on how you look at it.
The Pro-I features the world’s first 1-inch camera sensor with PDAF in a phone. Due to their size constraints, putting big image sensors in phones is quite expensive, from both a cost and engineering perspective. Sony’s latest high-end camera phone is no exception, with a starting price of $1,800. The Xperia Pro-I (which, just to clarify, Sony says is a capital “I” and not a lower case “l” or the roman numeral for 1), comes with a variety of sophisticated camera features for those really into mobile photography or vlogging.
In addition to that huge 12-MP 1-inch sensor, which Sony says is the same sensor used in the RX100 VII, the Xperia-I’s main camera sensor also supports super-fast phase-detect autofocus with 315 AF points that cover 90% of the frame and 12-bit RAW shooting. And similar to Sony’s more expensive mirrorless cameras, the Xperia-I also supports real-time Eye AF and real-time tracking while shooting photos and videos, to help keep your subject sharp even as they move around.
